Germany returns 3 ISIS women and 12 children from North and East Syria. Arrests 1 on suspicion of membership of a terrorist organization

BERLIN – German authorities have taken back three ISIS women and 12 children from the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. One of the women was arrested at arrival at Frankfurt International Airport by German criminal police on suspicion of being a member of a foreign terrorist organization.

The press release by Germany’s Attorney General said the accused woman is suspected in 3 cases (partly as a young person with responsibility, partly as an adolescent) of membership of a foreign terrorist organization, aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, and of a violation of the weapons act.

According to the arrest warrant, the accused is a German citizen and traveled to Syria in March 2015 at the age of 15 to join the foreign terrorist organization ISIS. In Syria, she married an ISIS member to become his third wife. ISIS gave her a semi-automatic self-loading Glock pistol.

At the end of 2015, in the course of systematic and widespread attacks by ISIS against Yazidis, the husband of the accused acquired a woman of Yazidi belief as a slave with the aim of selling her along with her two children at a profit. The accused supported this project. The sale of the Yazidi woman was actually implemented. When the ISIS Caliphate lost the city of Raqqa, the accused fled Raqqa with her husband and their two children in the summer of 2017. The accused ended up in a refugee camp with her two children at the beginning of January 2019, where she lived until she left.

One of the largest camps in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria is the al-Hol camp, which at the peak of its occupancy housed some 60,000 people, including family members and supporters of ISIS. Al-Hol was originally designed to house less than half that amount.

Security forces in North and East Syria continue to find kidnapped Yazidi girls and women in al-Hol. Many of them were kidnapped and sold as ‘sabya’ or sex slaves. In November, the director of the Office for the Rescue of Kidnapped Yazidis in Iraq announced the release of two kidnapped Yazidi girls – aged 15 and 20 – from the hands of the families of ISIS members.